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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 8226093" data-attributes="member: 2525">Not at all. I didn't say a word about how I am playing. I was talking about common situations like this in play (no reason to make it personal to me). It's not at all metagaming anything - the players themselves may know you have built in a way to get out, but their PC likely don't know and part of the game would be that they wouldn't know. Indeed, because you as the DM set up a situation where they could not win, you've already communicated to the PCs that the world is a harsh place that will kill them for making a mistake. And the mistake characters are most likely to jump to in that situation, because of the way the mechanics of that world work, is that 1) monsters will try to kill you once you've tried to kill them, and 2) monsters, particularly big ones with wings, will move faster than you and will kill you if you give them the opportunity like by turning you back on them and slowly (relatively to them) flee.Predators kill prey that flees. That's part of being a predator. Dragons in this situation are the predators. That's not meta knowledge, that's PC knowledge. That's the world those PCs live in.  They are not assuming all combats are winnable. They are assuming any combat is more winnable than fleeing and dying a certain death. Which is the position they are in - if they flee, they die, so might as well try to win a combat they don't think they can win. They could roll all criticals and the dragon could roll poorly or make a mistake in combat. Those odds might be incredibly low, but they're still better than the PCs not trying to attack at all and running away slower than the dragon chasing them can catch them AND attack at the same time.When a DM sends a monster against the party where the party cannot win, AND ALSO doesn't signal to the party that combat is not a winnable option but there are other options which would let the party survive sufficiently that the party can and is likely to pick up on those signals, THEN it's the DM either intentionally or recklessly setting them up for a predetermined TPK. Because the DM should know that fleeing doesn't work well in D&D. And you might have noticed that fleeing was in fact the topic raised in the original post, which is why I keep coming back to it.</blockquote>

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